How to build a company
Every job inside a company, what the person who does it looks like, what it costs, which ones you have to do yourself this year — and which of them can be the same person. 33 roles across 7 departments, built around a real job board — 27 roles open at once at a funded company — plus the field roles a trade business lives on.
You need to wear many hats to create a company, as a startup, land funding and become a future unicorn business.
Nobody hands a founder an org chart. The jobs exist from day one whether or not anyone is paid to do them — the books still have to balance, someone still has to answer the customer, and the payroll still has to be remitted on time. This page lists those jobs so you can decide, deliberately, which hats you keep, which you buy by the day, and which you hire.
The eight hats
Every company wears these whether or not it has anyone in the chair. The fractional version buys the judgment by the day rather than by the year — which is the whole argument for it before Series A.
Owns the direction, the money in the bank and the hiring bar. In a startup, also owns whatever nobody else owns yet.
Turns the plan into a working machine: delivery, hiring, the operating rhythm, and the unglamorous follow-through the founder keeps running out of time for.
Owns cash, the model, the raise mechanics and the audit. The person who knows exactly how many weeks of runway are left.
Owns what gets built, what it is built on, and whether the team can keep shipping in a year.
Owns the software the company runs on — what you buy, how it is connected, who can get into it, and what happens when it goes down.
Owns positioning, demand and the words the market repeats back to you — including the ones investors use in a partner meeting.
Owns the motion: how the product reaches a buyer, who it reaches them through, and what it costs to repeat. Partnering and growth, not messaging.
Owns hiring, employment compliance, compensation and the thing people mean when they talk about culture: who gets promoted and who gets let go.
The rest of the org chart, department by department
Everything that is not one of the eight hats above. Each role is one page: who to hire, what education and experience actually matter, whether domain experience is required, the credentials that exist and who issues them, what the job is at pre-seed versus Series A, and what it can be merged with.
Product & design
2 roles · 3 open on the example boardDeciding what gets built and what it feels like to use. A startup's first product manager is usually the founder; the first designer rarely is.
Headed by Fractional CTO — above, with the other hats.
Decides what gets built next and says no to the rest. Accountable for the outcome of the thing shipped, not for shipping it.
Owns how the product looks, behaves and holds together — and, in the systems version of the job, the components everyone else…
Technology
3 roles · 7 open on the example boardBuilding and running the thing. The hardest hires to judge if you are not technical, and the most expensive to get wrong.
Headed by Fractional CTO and Fractional CIO — above, with the other hats.
Builds and runs the product. At senior and staff level, also decides how it is built and raises everyone else's output.
Owns the part the customer touches — and, at architect level, the structure that keeps a large interface maintainable.
Owns the numbers the company trusts: the pipelines, the definitions, the warehouse and whether two dashboards can disagree.
Operations
6 roles · 8 open on the example boardWhere people and delivery live. HR belongs here — hiring, onboarding, payroll, employment compliance and mobility are operational work with a legal edge — alongside turning a signed customer into a working one. The CHRO and the COO are the two hats above it.
Headed by Fractional COO and Fractional CHRO — above, with the other hats.
The human on the other end of an employment process — getting a person hired, onboarded, paid and answered, correctly and in…
Answers the customer, fixes what can be fixed in the moment, and routes the rest to whoever can.
Makes cross-functional work actually finish: the launch, the migration, the certification, the thing that needs six people who do…
Pays people correctly and on time, in the right currency, with the right deductions and the right filings behind it.
Gets a person legally able to work where the company needs them, and keeps the permissions current.
Owns the first 30 to 90 days of a customer's life: getting them live, trained and using the thing they bought.
Field & trade
6 rolesThe people who do the billable work and the people who organise them. In a trade business these are the first hires and the whole product — every other department on this page exists to keep them busy and paid.
Headed by Fractional COO — above, with the other hats.
Does the licensed work, and is the reason the job passes inspection. In a small trade business, also the de facto trainer and…
Learns the trade on your jobs while doing the work that does not need a ticket — and is the only sustainable answer to a shortage…
Decides what a job will cost and what to charge for it — the single role with the most direct line to whether the business makes…
Owns the day: who goes where, in what order, with which parts — and tells the customer the truth about when.
Runs the crew on site: the sequence, the safety, the quality and whether the job finishes in the hours it was sold for.
Owns the whole delivery engine: the crews, the schedule, the fleet, the parts, the margins per job and the callback rate.
Finance
3 roles · 3 open on the example boardIts own department, reporting to its own hat. The books, the cash, the payments rails and the audit — kept deliberately separate from whoever spends the money, because that separation is the cheapest control a company has.
Headed by Fractional CFO — above, with the other hats.
Moves money across countries, currencies and banks — reliably, cheaply, and with a reconciliation trail.
Decides how a transaction is recorded and defends it — revenue recognition, equity, leases, acquisitions — and produces…
Keeps the books: the close, the reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, and the file the auditor will ask for.
Marketing & go-to-market
5 roles · 1 open on the example boardTwo halves that are often confused. The brand half does creative, positioning, campaigns and the story the company tells outward and repeats inward — the CMO's work. The go-to-market half is partnering and growth: partnerships for reach, SDRs (BDRs outside the United States) for pipeline, and account management for what you already won. Between them sits RevOps, the plumbing that makes marketing, sales and finance count the same thing the same way.
Headed by Fractional CMO and Fractional GTM — above, with the other hats.
Owns the customers you already have: adoption, renewal, expansion, and the early warning before one leaves.
Builds the routes to market you do not own: resellers, platforms, referral networks and the integrations that put you inside…
Starts conversations that did not exist yet — outbound research, first contact, qualification — and hands a real opportunity to…
The plumbing between marketing, sales and finance: one funnel, one set of definitions, one forecast everyone believes.
Runs the demand engine day to day: the site, the content, the campaigns, the launches and the numbers underneath them.
The order to hire in
Not a rule — a default, and one worth arguing with. The principle underneath it: hire the hat that is costing you the most money to keep wearing badly. Nearly every founder gets finance and people help later than they should, and marketing leadership earlier.
The example: Pebl’s own job board
27 roles open at once across 7 departments and 10 locations — the shape of a company that has raised and is scaling. Quoted as published — the point is the shape, not the vacancies. Notice that operations is the largest department, that the same role is open in four countries at once, and that there is exactly one marketing listing.
Product & design · 3
- Senior Product ManagerPalo Alto, CA
- Design Systems LeadPalo Alto, CA
- Product Manager, Lifecycle ManagementToronto, Ontario
Technology · 7
- Staff Software EngineerPalo Alto, CA
- Senior Frontend Software Engineer — Invoicing & PaymentsPalo Alto, CA
- Senior Software EngineerPalo Alto, CA
- Senior Staff Software Engineer — UI ArchitectPalo Alto, CA
- Director of DataPalo Alto, CA
- Director of DataToronto, Ontario
- Senior Software EngineerToronto, Ontario
Operations · 8
- HR Experience Specialist, OnboardingMedellín, Colombia
- Experience SpecialistMedellín, Colombia
- Program ManagerCanada
- Payroll AdministratorBengaluru, India
- Sr. Immigration Specialist, Middle EastBengaluru, India
- Manager, OnboardingBengaluru, India
- HR Experience SpecialistMedellín, Colombia
- Senior HR Specialist, Customer OnboardingLisbon, Portugal
Finance · 3
- Senior Manager of Global PaymentsBengaluru, India
- Manager, Technical Accounting and ReportingUnited States
- Senior Accountant, Corporate AccountingBengaluru, India
Marketing & go-to-market · 1
- Marketing ManagerLondon, United Kingdom
Source: Pebl careers, retrieved 2026-10-09. Listings are that company’s, not Part Owner’s — we are not hiring these.
Then: how to actually run the business
The org chart is half the problem. The other half is the operating detail of the vertical you are in — the procedures, the software the trade runs on, the licences, and where to buy.